So, I’ve been testing a new workflow for animation.

Previously, I was only using Photoshop. Frankly, it’s terrible for hand-drawn animation. But I recently rediscovered Pencil, a free pencil-test program, and am trying a new workflow: rough animations in Pencil, put frames in Photoshop, trace over frames making sure they look good frame by frame, and export the final for use in Unity3D. It’s extra work, but I think it’ll lead to better animation, and may be quicker too when not second-guessing myself in Photoshop. We’ll see.

In the meantime, here’s some test animations made in Pencil so far. In my opinion, it’s a huge improvement over “James,” so I’m hopeful that I am getting better.

Drew – Idle, Running, Jumping Animations combined

Test animation of tired man. Unrelated to projects.

Not perfect, but pretty darn good. And looking back at “James,” I still think he looked fantastic, despite mediocre animation. I can’t wait to finish Drew, and show you how she looks in motion.

Speaking of which, who the #$*! is Drew? The game is called

“Drew and the Floating Labyrinth.”

I’ll say a lot more next week, but am currently trying to finish the animation part for showing it off locally this Saturday. After that, I’ll have a lot to say on the state of my current game dev work. Deadlines… too many deadlines…